Closing the Quality Gap in Low-Resource Text-to-Speech: LoRA Fine-Tuning of VoxCPM2 for Khmer and Korean
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Closing the Quality Gap in Low-Resource Text-to-Speech: LoRA Fine-Tuning of VoxCPM2 for Khmer and Korean
Abstract:Large pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models sound almost human for well-resourced languages, but much worse for languages that are rare in their training data. We study this quality gap for Khmer and Korean using VoxCPM2, a 2.4B-parameter, tokenizer-free TTS model that joins a MiniCPM-4 language-model backbone with a flow-matching diffusion decoder. We build one shared, language-tagged corpus of about 26 hours and adapt VoxCPM2 with a single Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter, trained on both languages at once and added to both the language model and the decoder. The adapter is zero-initialized, so training starts exactly at the original (zero-shot) model. In native-speaker listening tests, the Khmer Mean Opinion Score (MOS) rises from 3.85 to 4.23 with the best adapter (rank 64), a highly significant gain (paired Wilcoxon test, p<0.001), while training only 0.19 to 3.03 percent of the parameters. The automatic loss and the human ratings, however, disagree on the best rank: validation loss is lowest at rank 128, yet MOS peaks at rank 64. The same adapter brings no gain for Korean, a language the base model already handles well, and at a high rank it even degrades quality. Adaptation therefore helps mainly where the base model is genuinely weak.
| Comments: | 5 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables. IEEE conference format (IEEEtran) |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.26618 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.26618v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26618
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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